36. Meadow In The Sky

Writer Liz McCrocklin shares how tending to her tiny garden in New York makes everything feel okay. 

You can find Liz and her writing over at her Substack, A True Life Built. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

I’m Liz McCrocklin and it’s going to be okay. 

I write a substack called A True Life Built, which is my story of starting over. And this is an essay called Meadow in the Sky about rebuilding my garden when I was starting over: 

At the start of 2020, I lived in Nairobi and believed myself rooted in Kenya. I thought I had dug myself firmly into the red soil with my steady job, my newly built home, and the glorious acre of garden that I had just coaxed into bloom. 

I wandered my wild meadow each morning, drinking coffee and greeting the growing things. Good morning, acacias and pomegranates. Good morning. Craggy cactuses and Pacific India tumbling down the hill. Good morning, Birds feasting on pink grasses and sprays of small white butterflies drifting in the breeze like confetti. How lucky I am. I think to myself, this is where I’ll grow old. 

But when COVID broke, my ties to Kenya, tore like tissue paper in the wind. When I flew back into Brooklyn a few months later. I felt like a tumbleweed belonging to nowhere and no one. I hadn’t just lost a garden. I’d lost my faith in security itself. 

I was raised with a deep faith in my own competence and my ability to shape the arc of my life. I made plans with spreadsheets, and mostly that came true. Achievement, it seemed, was the great imperative. The formula was simple work hard, achieve things, feel stable. I confidently stacked one trophy on top of the next. 

Earn straight A’s, graduate college early, climb the career ladder. Date your college crush, get married, build a dream home. Once my pile of trophies was complete, then I would be too. 

You’ve always struck me, a friend said recently, as one of the most ferociously capable people I’ve ever met. I smiled at this, but also flinched. She wasn’t wrong. I built my identity around this fierce competence, around my picture perfect home and glorious garden. But the striving left me brittle, hollowed out by the constant strain of holding things together. 

And if it could all tear so easily, if everything I built could vanish overnight, then what was all the achieving for? It’s not that hard work doesn’t matter. It does. But no matter how carefully you’ve laid out the pieces of your life, there are reckonings that swoop in sideways and suddenly reset the whole board when it happens, and it will, you can scramble to put the pieces back in their old places. Or you can start playing a different game. 

Here’s the humbling truth of it. My competence built me a gilded cage and chaos set me free. I’ll be forever grateful that I didn’t get what I thought I wanted. 

The word humility I learned recently comes from the Latin root cumulus, which means grounded or of the earth. How fitting, I think, for the loss of the garden humbled me, stripping away my veneer of control. Yet it was in that void, in that powerless place, that new ways of being started to root. I haven’t made peace with change or frenemies is at best.

I still struggle daily with a deep need to achieve to earn gold stars and prove my worth. And I probably will forever. That is no longer the whole story and I no longer feel hollow. 

I rebuilt my meadow and Brooklyn now on my postage stamp patio in the sky. I know that if it disappears tomorrow, I have it within me to build it again. It’s not the garden that defines me. It’s the love of gardening. I can grow wildflowers anywhere. I still drink my coffee and greet the growing things. 

Good morning, Switchgrass. With your sprays of seeds like fireworks. Good morning. Lazy dragonflies hovering on the oxides and bees nuzzling the purple sage. Good morning. Climbing roses, stretching for the sky and herbs exhaling lemon and mint. I tend my many meadow and it nurtures me in return. I no longer see it as a trophy, but as a living meditation. The flowers don’t care what I have achieved. They simply offer their faces to the sky and their pollen to the bees. Day after day, they go about the joyful business of living. And for now, that is enough. 

I was in Kenya. I thought I was rooted there long married, and I had just built this miraculous acre garden. And COVID came and I had about 48 hours to decide. Borders were closing. Pick a country, Kenya or the US. I picked the US. My ex picked Kenya and I got on a plane and I finished the garden. 

The day I left, I hung the last plant and I took some photos. I think a piece of me knew that I wasn’t coming back. And I took some photos and I was like, Oh, the garden is done. I’m going to get on a plane. And I did. And I got back to Brooklyn and I was like, I’m not going back. It’s time to start something new. 

And I rebuilt it last year. It took me two years to build something new on my back deck. It was finally my project. I was like, I’m ready to root here. It’s New York, so you don’t get an anchor in New York. The tiny little patio that I designed it all. I’m looking at it right now and it’s just starting to come back to bloom. 

And it was the first time I felt, okay, I have resettled and I’ve created something beautiful and. Take in what was beautiful of the last place and incorporated it into my life now. And it’s my constant source of joy and peaceful place.

OUTRO MUSIC

CREDITS